


Any Other Name

by altairattorney



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Broken Families, Canonical Character Death, Family Angst, Gen, Kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 16:33:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4753265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altairattorney/pseuds/altairattorney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We don’t know what we have until we lose it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PengyChan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PengyChan/gifts).



> Neverending character study for Ma Pines, and a gift for pengychan – she got me the sweetest Gravity Falls charms, and this is the only way I currently have to pay her back. Super angst and disintegrating families ahead.

Maureen obviously knew she was Maureen. She just didn’t like remembering.

She could never focus on her name without that other idea slipping into her mind. The thoughts came together like cherries – just one of them wouldn’t be enough for a complete picture. If it was natural to everyone like it was to her, she never even wondered.

Maureen was Maureen. However, called by a different name, she would still be herself. Something in her head always reminded her, and she loved playing around with the concept.

She snuck to her mother’s wardrobe a little too often. The scoldings had stopped early – the little girl was unstoppable when she ran off to the courtyard, carrying what would be the trophy of the day, to stay with her friends until the sun went down. She wrapped the scarves around her hair, alight with pride, completely ignoring the fact they were way too big for her.

She liked to choose rich, varied colors. The prettier they were, the easier it became to feel inspired. That was when she turned into Gloria, or Sandy, or Daphne.

Maureen loved being someone else. It was the only way she had to make things better. 

She was pretty sure it had started with her father. She had built a world around that one photograph of him. She had decreed he was the best father in the world, and her imagination had complied – she pictured him brave, kind, even more dashing than the handsome aviator with a blurry smile.

She filled the amazed ears of her friends with his adventures. In her words and their shining eyes, he was still travelling all around the world. Shooting bad guys, doing good things, collecting gifts for the day he would come home.

The grown-ups said she lied, and she really couldn’t see what was wrong with it. It was much better than a crashed airplane, than a man who could never return.

Maureen never abandoned her nature. When everyone else started telling her it was wrong, she still didn’t get it.

There weren’t things she felt particularly unhappy about, it was true. But there was also so much to wish for.

Why give it up, when dreams cost nothing?

*

The one true regret of her serene wifely life was Mrs. Fiddlesticks.

If their quarrels had only concerned the monsters she called her cats, having her as a neighbor would have still been bearable. They enjoyed, after all, the rare privilege of a semi-detached house, which was something Filbrick had uncharacteristically insisted on.

It wasn’t about her stony gaze, or her irresistible urge to get rid of the dirt in the exact spots where the wind brought it to their shop. Not even her foul-smelling flowers were the worst thing. Her habits, and grudges, had settled like dust until nobody cared. 

What she really hated about the old widow was her being the most judgmental creature she had ever laid her eyes on. And if all Maureen had gone through hadn’t gotten her used to judgement yet, she was pretty sure not even Mrs. Fiddlesticks would do the trick.

The words that old rag of a woman had wasted on her were countless. She had always something to say about whatever failure of Maureen’s – or so she called them – came to her mind. It was Filbrick, not caring enough. Her sons, rowdy and noisy during her afternoon nap. 

Her constant, subtle jabs criticized everyone’s choices without mercy. Maureen knew that protesting would have been impossible, if she had cared enough to try. But she didn’t – her own way of dealing with the world was enough to face anything.

The truth was, Maureen didn’t know any other way. She had tried many, just to stick with the first and only one to ever work. She could only go for things if, instead of them as a whole, she saw in them what she liked to see.

When nothing else was possible, it was creating and altering to make her happiness real. Lies were only bad to whoever rejected that fact. How had it been wrong to build her job and her life around her natural element? To dream for people who couldn’t do it, and get paid, was not unfair. Everyone needed dreams.

And she rarely focused on it, but she needed them as well. If Maureen built her own version of the future in her head, no outer force could make it go wrong. She explained it to Mrs. Fiddlesticks with mere tricks – cards and glass spheres, symbols in the sky. Same excuses for the same needs.

When Filbrick was too hard to reach, he was stable and quiet. When her sons were sad, she held them tight, telling them to close their eyes and forget. She was convincing and always ready to conceal – it was natural for her to make the most of any situation.

Her tomorrow spoke to her always, Maureen claimed with decision. Mrs. Fiddlestick’s annoyed expression did not stop her. She was meant to be a good mother, to enjoy a long, happy life in a happy family. Everything was alright. As always, everything was alright.

If she believed in it with enough strength, it would always be. 

*

The day she was left without a son for the first time, Maureen found out reality was much harder to cope with than she thought. 

She couldn’t have stopped it in any way. Or so she believed, for a very long time. Reconstructing what had happened took her years, and the suspect it wasn’t actually possible to see through it all never left her to her dying day.

There were too many barriers between her and the truth. The time had come for her to cross them. She had never really needed to before – that was the heaviest realization to deal with, in the years to come.

Maureen tried hard, beyond her rage. Then, once she got over herself, she realized her own defenses had turned into countless obstacles. A whole world of expectations, hopes and life-changing opportunities had collapsed – and nothing of the sort could vanish without leaving a trace.

When the haze of disbelief and disappointment passed, Maureen couldn’t do better than focusing on what she still had. A son whose life needed rebuilding, and a creature who fully depended on her yet. 

She never stopped thinking of what she had lost, either. But the look on Filbrick’s face found her unprepared every time. With facts so harsh and irreversible, she never came up with any convincing alternatives to silence.

Maureen took to sitting by the phone all day. Her eager waiting for calls was concealed under the excuse of her job. She kept lying to whoever would come to her – because the exception, the one voice she desperately wanted to answer with sincerity, never arrived.

And it was alienating, between her and Shermie’s meals, to truly notice how good she was at making up things. How comforting she could be to people who had lost everything, or had nothing, and lived off the hope of a brighter future. 

She was one of the lot now. It was so strange that, of all people, she couldn’t help herself.

*

It was not so hard to contain her feelings, until the nightmares came.

Maureen dreamt of picking up the phone to find an eternal silence. She would scream, endlessly, until the hollow space in the wire filled up to the brim with echoes. She awoke to that. It happened the most during the winter, when the streets and the deserts were ice cold, and she couldn’t stop thinking how, somewhere out there, the son she had left alone was struggling.

She surrendered to insomnia, and stared at the window for hours. She soon gave up on hoping. It grew to be pure force of habit.

Stanford was always the same. Still far and still bitter. And if Filbrick was out of the question, there was still someone in the house who could help her – defenseless, silent, unable to remember.

The role of her atonement fell on Shermie. She couldn’t even afford to feel guilty for that. Maureen kept him in his arms during those nights, and sang useless lullabies long after he had fallen asleep. Sometimes, she caught her arms holding him so tight that she had to let go, nearly afraid to break him.

Her guilt poured on him like a mantra. She wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes, this time. She would give anything for him. She would stay close, no matter the cost, no matter the fights and the screams.

She would. It was the least she could do.

How exactly had she failed before?

*

The nursery rhymes could not last forever. They were as much of a placebo as the rest of her habits. When Shermie was too old to control, and his needs no longer so obvious, Maureen began falling apart.

The day started like any other, with her desperate son (too lonely? too needy? where had she been wrong this time?) sobbing on his way to kindergarten. Stanford weakly tried to calm him down, distracted by his stained project sheet and the spilt contents of a mug. Filbrick told them to keep quiet. It was all he had been able to do, since Stanley was gone.

Mrs. Fiddlesticks found her on the edge of her door, and her disapproving look became Maureen’s mirror. She saw herself, clothes and hair a complete mess. She pictured the sheer despair of a tired mother, all within those inquisitive eyes.

How Maureen could be a fortune-teller, the widow commented with arrogance, she had no idea. She had failed so vastly in predicting her own.

Maureen thought of it long and hard, throughout many of the following days.

And she broke down.

*

The future was the only open door, she recited, heartlessly, to ever rarer clients. Dwelling on the wrongs of the past was meaningless, when one could look forward to the riches of the future.

It was with a different energy altogether that she slammed down the phone horn, at the end of each conversation, and took up her search again.

Filbrick said and knew nothing. He was vaguely aware of it, maybe – but neither cared. Their marital accord had crumbled to pieces with every passing day, leaving room to silence alone. And every time she thought of what had caused it, identifying it more and more with a choice she had never taken part in, she couldn’t bring herself to regret their current situation.

What she did regret was too great to define in words, or even ideas. There was no telling how much she had lost, just because of her eternal distance. The more she wove nets of calls, browsing addresses and identities of someone who soon began to sound like an outlaw, the less she felt sure to track him down again. 

She was alone in her search. Who else could care? The thought tugged at her chest painfully, forcing her to examine what had become of her life. If Stanford was bound to chase after his genius anyway, Shermie had been too oppressed by the weight of an accident he had never witnessed. He had soon grown tired of his family, and left it behind to build his own life.

She was paying the price of her choices. She was on her own.

Fair enough, she repeated to herself, choking back her tears.

The more she looked for him, the more Stanley turned into smoke and mirrors. She often recognized the trace of expedients she had resorted to herself, in the worst of occasions. There was so much of her trade in his vanishing acts – the idea was so frustrating, she felt like tearing the last of her hair away. 

That was what her example had left him. Despite her failure as a mother and a friend, she had taught him well – and taught him  _what_.

Maureen lied for a living. But that was her life. It was just their fault – hers and Filbrick’s –  if he had been forced to retrace her steps.

It wasn’t what they had wished for him. And yet, in the very moment they had started expecting it, they had doomed him to that future.

She found information, eventually. She did not have time to rejoice. The news came in the form of a gigantic headline, bound to a photo she never found the courage to look at. 

And when she read the article, each of the hundreds of times she did so in the weeks that followed, she realized there had been no remedy from the start.

*

We don’t know what we have until we lose it. It was trite, predictable, and honestly in bad taste. But she refused to lay down Stanley’s coffin without that reminder as his epitaph.

Not even Filbrick was there. The shock had gotten the best of his already compromised health. Like the newspaper had entered their home, he had entered a hospital room, and Maureen doubted he would ever leave it if not dead.

She was the last to go after his remains were earthed. Not that it would change anything, at this point. But she needed time – and some time she took, standing alone in the grass – to count all the other people she could not forgive for this.

With all the weight of her guilt, she couldn’t help thinking of Stanford the longest. She was furious, in the helpless way that accompanies a loss. Maureen would never believe his pathetic excuses for his pettiness. He couldn’t be too busy. He couldn’t be too angry. It was his brother’s funeral they were talking about.

The light rain brought her a memory, on the edge of his miserable, barren tomb. She saw a beach and a happy family, in the years of their fragile happiness. She remembered two cheerful young man, so incredibly similar to the children they had been. They were her sons, with one on the way. They were young, strong, glowing with life. They were her future.

She couldn’t help wondering, beneath the dark clouds on her forehead. Where had all of it disappeared to? Where had they gone?

It was too late to wonder, and Maureen knew. From things like those, there was  no going back. By the time she retraced the way home, even her footsteps had already changed forever.

She imagined a child, with a whole life ahead to make her mistakes. She thought of Gloria, or Sandy, or Mrs. Pines. She remembered all the lucky, beautiful women she had been at some point.

She felt melancholic, but not surprised, when she realized she had somehow turned into their ghost.

Then she remembered –  lying was like breathing to her. It was not a joke, nor a trick for fools. It was a way of life.

Step by step, in the maze of her memory, Maureen thought of each empty promise she had made to a stranger. They never ended. She felt glad she was not there to see it, when most of them were let down.

But they lived off their dreams, and she had helped somehow. This could be payback. Maybe it was just the same for her. 

All she had left was dreaming of a paradise.


End file.
